Page 141 - February 2021
P. 141
From
Humble Beginnings
Dr. Larry Findley has put his own and his family’s talents to work to forge a thriving veterinary complex
by Diane Rice
On West Street less than four miles east of Delta Downs Racetrack and four miles south of downtown Vinton, Louisiana,
population 3,300, sits the newest version of Larry Findley Sr. DVM’s Delta Equine Center (DEC).
The state-of-the art veterinary complex comprises two main buildings. The first houses two treatment rooms; two induction and recovery rooms; a surgical suite with monorail system to transport anesthetized horses; MRI and digital x-ray rooms; hyperbaric therapy chamber; and consultation, exam, and treatment areas in addition to 40 spacious rubber-matted concrete stalls.
And Delta’s small-animal wing has separate but similarly appointed facilities.
The other building houses the reproduction operation including a high-tech laboratory and facilities for semen collection, exams, palpations, ultrasound, embryo flushing and insemination in addition to a contained walker, a wash area, 12 stallion stalls and 75 mare and foaling stalls that feed into the paddock area.
But the original Delta Equine, founded by Dr. Findley in 1983, wasn’t quite so “shiny.” His third son, Craig, describes its original location on Crain Road north of town.
“We all grew up feeding horses on that property,” Craig says of his three brothers. “We had to walk across the pasture on what were like cow trails to get from the house to the facility.
“When Dad had to do a colic surgery, I’d (or we’d—it wasn’t always me) have to go to the hay barn, load two bales of alfalfa on a dolly and drag it what felt like a football field’s length to get it
to the breeding shed, where the breeding dummy was. Dad would literally drop the horse right there to do the colic surgery. We’d take those two bales of alfalfa and roll the horse on its back, and Dad would do all the surgical scrubbing, draping, and gowning to make it sanitary before he made his incision. Then he’d do that surgery right there.”
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